


Knowledge, not Faith

by Just_Mad_Enough



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, F/M, Gen, I'm one of many now, Major Character Injury, NOT show-Finale, Post-Finale, another post reveal fiction, spoiler for season 3 finale, that's SEASON Finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-07 23:08:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14681367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Just_Mad_Enough/pseuds/Just_Mad_Enough
Summary: ...but the fact that there’s a giant pair of blood-flecked wings spread out from her partners back shoots reason right between the eyes...





	1. The thing with feathers

**Author's Note:**

> Soooo, has anyone else noticed how his wings weren't covering his whole body? I just kept on wondering how the hell he didn't get hit anywhere aside from his wings so... this is what my brain volunteered as an answer. Hope you like it!

She can hear Lucifer scream, can hear the sound of automatic weapons firing in that unmistakable rattle, but her eyes still stay stubbornly closed. She tries, _so hard_ , because she needs to get her arm back up and return fire -  out of the two of them, she’s the only one who _has_ a weapon, and she can’t just leave Lucifer on his own.

But then. The gunfire stops, as does the screaming, and most other sounds with it. There’s a whoosh, a rush of movement and fresh air and sunlight on her face. This seems to do the trick, and she is finally able to pry her eyes open. They’re on the roof of a building, smack in the middle of a helipad. She strains her neck a little and sees the building they’ve been in only moments ago – it’s nearly two blocks away.

With his help, she’s able to sit up straight and turn around enough to look at him. The relief in his eyes as he encounters her bulletproof west is so clear she’d have noticed it if she were blind, deaf and stupid to boot. She wants to find a reasonable explanation to how they got up there, but the fact that there’s a giant pair of blood-flecked wings spread out from her partners back shoots reason right between the eyes. The sight also explains how they’re not both the human equivalent to ground meat, and she can’t find it in herself to panic. So he’s the Devil, so what. The scariest thing about him had always been his ignorance to any speed limit known to man. And anyway, they’re alive, everything else can wait. She believes in that right until he makes sure she’s actually alright and then just lists to the side and collapses in an ungraceful heap before she can catch him, and now she’s the one screaming, shaking him, asking him what’s wrong. His blinks up at her, and then his eyes roll back. The wings disappear in the same moment he loses consciousness entirely.

It doesn’t take long to find out what the problem is, at least. There’s blood seeping out from under him, and since she can’t find anything on his front, she rolls him to the side. Blood has painted the black of his suit even darker. She wrangles him out of the jacket, his body loose and ragdoll-like in a way that makes her want to throw up. Pulling out the not-quite-legal switchblade in her boot, she makes quick work of his button up and finds a neat, little hole low on the right side of his back, somewhere between liver and kidney, and _oh hey,_ there’s _the panic I’ve been looking for_.

She’s trying to call dispatch when her phone rings in her hand, and it’s Dan. She puts the phone on speaker, tells him to track her phone and to get an ambulance and help, _now_.

She doesn’t hang up – her hands are busy trying to keep the blood inside, where it belongs. Dan’s voice is faraway and tinny, somewhere in the background, and she tunes him out completely.

Somewhere between a murmured _Please, God_ and an equally ferocious _if you die, I’ll fucking_ kill _you,_ he stops breathing.

She tries to get enough air into her own lungs so she won’t pass out, because she won’t be any help to him if she does. _Deep breath_. She bunches his ruined jacket up and rolls him around again, hopes the pressure of his body against fabric will be enough to keep him from bleeding out, and starts with chest compressions. Counts down in her head, hears Dan screaming, stops and breathes for the Devil. Rinse and repeat.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been at it when medical personnel crashes through the access door and she’s unceremoniously pushed to the side. They work as quickly as possible. Someone says something along the lines of _bag him_ , and she’s this close to punch that idiot, when she realizes it’s not a body bag they’re talking about, but a way to get oxygen into him. Electric whirring, her partner’s body seizing up with the electric currents running through him. Again. _Again_. And then, the most beautiful sound in the world as a machine starts beeping in a more or less even rhythm. They load him up on a gurney and she’s right behind them. She won’t let him out of her side.

It’s going to be fine. _He’s_ going to be fine, or so help him God.

 _No_ , she thinks suddenly, armed with not _Faith_ but actual _Knowledge_ , and her shoulders straighten, and her eyes turn hard. He’s going to be fine, or someone will need to help _God_.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh. Sorry this took me so long! Work kept me busy, I was actually having trouble to decide where to go with this (I had too MANY options instead of a lack of them...) and then I started to write and promptly had a nasty, nasty cold. Now, I know this is a pretty short update, but it really is only the lead-in still. Next update WILL be faster (mostly because I'll be on vacation from next week on ;)). HUGE thanks to FluffyGlitterPantsDragon to give this a read-through! You rock!  
> Now, on with it!

He’s dead. Pierce is dead, and he had never felt so bad about _not_ breaking a promise. A Devil of his word, indeed.

He can hear the Detective entering the room from somewhere behind him at the same time he feels his skin burn away as though he crash-landed on the bottom of The Pit all over again. The pain of it zaps through his whole body, but it’s fleeting; there one moment, gone the next. Bit like an electric shock, really. Though the one in for the biggest shock will be Chloe, he’s sure of it.

He kneels there, beside the corpse of the oldest human being, and tries to will the horrors of Hell away, but it’s no use. He’s stuck with actual fire in his eyes and the burned ruin that had once been the Archangel Samael.

It had been inevitable from the very beginning anyway. He had _known_ that things would go downhill if she ever found out the truth, just as he had known that she had a _right_ to said truth.

So he got up and turned around, slowly, carefully, trying to seem as unthreatening as he knew how.

“Detective…” He thought maybe it would help her, to hear his voice – the one thing that had never, in all his millennia of existence, changed. But the only thing it did was to shock her out of her wide-eyed staring. She stumbled back a few steps and slumped down onto the stairs behind her.

He saw that her gun was still clutched firmly in one hand, while the other covered as much of the vulnerable flesh of her throat as she could.

“I don’t… I… how…” Ah, yes. Incoherent mumbling. He should’ve patented that, since he’d probably _invented_ it the first time he showed his true face to a human.

He stayed where he was, didn’t even _try_ to get closer to her. Right now, she was neither unconscious nor running away in a primeval instinct to safe her immortal soul. He would give her as much time as he could, under the circumstances.

But given the fact that there where an uncounted amount of… henchmen, for lack of a better description, and a dead police lieutenant in the building with them, time was quickly running out.

She’d need to get her act together, at least long enough to talk to the first responders that were sure to be on their way.

“Detective, I know this is a lot to take in right now, but please, _please_ take a deep breath and shove the panic away for right now. I promise you can shoot me again, later; or you can ban me from your life, if you’d rather do _that_. But we need think of something to tell the swarm of uniforms that is sure to arrive any moment now. Get our stories straight, as it were.”

He held his breath, rubbed his breastbone – the Detective must’ve been nearly too close when Cain tried to shoot him again, and it _hurt_ and…

***

_“Clear!” his whole body hurt and spasmed, and there was something stuck in his throat. He couldn’t breathe, and the light above him was too bright; nasty and fluorescent, nothing nature would ever produce._

_“You’re fine, you’re going to be fine, come on Lucifer, please…”_

_***_

He blinked, and the lights swimming in front of his eyes were gone again, replaced with the slack jawed, empty-eyed stare of his favorite human. As _if_ he had time for bloody hallucinations right now!

“Det… Chloe. Come on. I know I’m not quite as handsome as I usually am but…”

“ _Leave_. Please.” His heart feels like it might shrivel up any moment now, and there’s a steady, high pitched ringing in his ears. His heart is pounding so hard, it nearly feels as if someone is hammering on his chest with rip-breaking force. He thinks it might be panic, but he’s not familiar enough with the feeling to be sure.

***

_She’s panicking. She **knows** she is but… he had opened his eyes, and she thought he might be getting better - or at least stable - now that he’s getting help. But then machine gave that dreaded noise again, telling her that her partner was flatlining again. And now his eyes were open, staring into nothing as his body is moving limply with the compressions one of the paramedics was administering, and all she can think is that she’d much rather have them closed again. At least he’d looked merely unconscious with them closed, not dead, as he does now._

_“…nonono, come on, you can’t just **leave** , **please**!”_

_***_

He takes a step back but doesn’t do as she says. He can’t just leave her alone with this mess, even if he doesn’t know what he can do, looking like this.

In the end, the decision is taken out of his hands. One moment he tries to ban his nastier side away again, the next he sees stars. He thinks the world had gone off its axis until he realizes that the problem lies somewhere else.

Cain kneels above him, face a grimace of madness and hate. He has the knife that was supposed to have ended him clutched in his fist, and Lucifer realizes that he had used it’s handle to knock him down.

He can feel blood matting down his hair, but what worries him more is the fact that the man walks over him, towards Chloe and he can’t bloody _move_. He tries to, desperately, but his limbs aren’t obeying him. The most he manages is turn his head, and he regrets that right quick. Chloe is still trapped somewhere between shock and horror and all he can’t do anything but watch as Cain drags her up by her hair and presses the knife to her throat.

She gasps, and there’s fight back in her eyes. She tries to get loose, but between superior body strength and a few thousand years’ worth of experience, his hold is all but unbreakable.

And all Lucifer can do is lie there and stare in unequaled horror.

Cain pushes down and drags the knife across her throat, opening her up nearly to her spine and drops her. She’s dead before she hits the floor.

The man grins at him, no sanity anywhere in sight, and steps over the body.

When he reaches Lucifer, he kneels again and unceremoniously plunges the knife right into the devil’s heart (as if he hadn’t already killed more than half of it a moment ago, right across the room).

“Time of death…”

***

_“Time of death…”_

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo, can anyone guess what's happening? I'm giving out cookies to every right guess (well, actually I'll be giving out cyber-cookies, but at least they won't make anyone gain weight, right?).  
> Reviews are love!


	3. Awake while I'm asleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, no real news. I'm on vacation and am enjoying the ocean. My beta reader FluffyGlitterPantsDragon is STILL the best!

They arrive at the hospital with blue light glaring and the sirens blaring. Lucifer is alive, if barely. Not breathing on his own or awake in any sense of the word, but he has a heartbeat and that’s all she can hope for right now.

The EMT’s try to leave her behind when they wheel him into one of the secluded rooms, but she refuses. She doesn’t know why, but she has a feeling that she won’t see him again if she lets him out of her sight.

So she stands in a corner, watches nurses and doctors do… whatever, and hopes it’s enough to save her partner. She doesn’t know if she’ll be able to take a free, deep breath again if she loses him now.

When they take him to surgery she flashes her badge and bullies her way into the theater, where she sits surrounded by med-students and other medical personnel viewing the goings on like they bought arena seats at a sporting event. She has half a mind to send them away or scream at them. Or maybe to just break down in tears. But her body is refusing to move, her eyes trained on Lucifer. He’s all covered in blue sheets. Aside from the that, she mostly just sees tubes and wires. And blood, so very much of it, spilled for her. _On_ her. Her hands and clothes are still stained with it, and if Lucifer’s desire trick would work on her, he’d probably be deeply troubled by her answer. She really just wants to go down into the OR and force someone to take all the blood smeared on her person and _demand_ that they put it back where it belongs.

*** *** ***

_He lies there and stares at Chloe’s empty eyes, and he’s never felt so stupid in his entire existence. **Why** did he throw the blade in after his mother? He should’ve known that he’d need it at some point – and so what if the point was his own death? Really, he’s been around for long enough. Hell could run itself just fine, Maze didn’t want him around anymore and neither did his siblings. Better to just bow out and sleep. Non-existence sounded like the best course of action, but he got rid of the only weapon at his disposal that could accomplish such an act. And he **really** doubted that Michael would be so kind as to hand **his** sword over._

_With Chloe…gone… his injuries healed at speed. He could feel the shredded wings mending and the wound on his skull closing. He could move again, now._

_Cain had left, leaving him to stare at his Detective. He knelt down beside her and closed her eyes, not wanting to see them now that they’ve lost their shine._

_He doesn’t know how long he’s been kneeling there when back-up starts to arrive. Uniforms rush in, guns drawn and shouting. They manhandle him roughly; press him down to the floor and handcuff his hands behind his back. It doesn’t hurt when they drag his arms back farther than they strictly need. His shoulders should sting, and he knows he probably would’ve dislocated one if only **… if only**. Saddest words since the creation of **any** language._

_They read him his Miranda rights and march him out of the building. He can see Daniel, standing in the middle of the room, shock planting his feet to the floor, and Ella who is sobbing while simultaneously trying to get on some gloves._

_Then he’s out the door and stuffed into the back of a patrol car._

*** *** ***

Her hands are finally clean, and the nurses made her change into some spare scrubs. She doesn’t know if it’s so she doesn’t scare patients and other visitors, or because the amount of blood made her a walking biohazard, but she doesn’t really care either.

Lucifer made it through, anything else can wait. _Stable but serious condition._ Not as good as she’d hoped, but beggars can’t be choosers, and all that.

She holds one of his hands in hers and just _looks_. She _knows_ now. But no matter how hard she looked - at him, into her own mind - she can’t see The Devil there. Just as she told him - he’s not, at least not to her. So he’s _Lucifer_ , The Morningstar (when she had looked into all those devil stories after meeting him, she stumbled over quite a few names. Or maybe titles, whatever. Son of the Morning. Adversary. Lightbringer. Satan. All regarding the same being, and all of them vastly contradictory). It really doesn’t make that much of a difference to her. She _knows_ evil - and Lucifer is not.

She’s still sitting there, contemplating on whether praying would help or harm, when Dan and Ella come all but crashing through the door. Chloe blinks up at them, and she knows she probably looks owlish and out of it.

“Guys. Hey. Uh… Did I call you? Wait no… I don’t have my phone. Think it might be with my clothes or…” Aaaand she’s rambling. _Great._

“You left your phone on the roof. One of the paramedics picked it up and left it with Lucifer’s things. I pinged it, came here, and asked for him.” Dan sounds strained, and she appreciates it. She might’ve flipped if he had sounded as though everything was alright.

“Oh. Okay, good. That’s… good.”

She smiles at them, tight and tired, and then goes back to watch her partner’s chest rise and fall with each artificially forced breath.

Ella, for once, is subdued and utterly quiet. In the end they both pull chairs away from the wall and sit down on the other side of the bed. They’re here, keeping silent vigil with her. She doesn’t know if they know any details of what happened - if they talked to the first responders or to a doctor, or if they just wait until she’s more… _here_ , to answer any questions they have. Either way she’s glad for the silence while simultaneously hoping it would be broken by a sexual innuendo spoken in a British accent.

*** *** ***

_He sits in an interrogation room, hands cuffed and chained to the table. Someone’s placed a cup of coffee in front of him, still steaming. There’s a Detective sitting across from him, but he can’t remember his name. The man is talking, but it all sounds like white-noise to him. Probably asking questions. What happened. Who fired the first shot. That sort of thing. He hopes that… Bill? Bob? **Whoever** , gets tired of his questions soon. Then they’ll lock him into a holding cell and he can go to sleep. Maybe he would dream, for once?_

_He’d like that. He could dream that he saved her. Flew her farther away so she couldn’t make it back to him so soon. Or maybe he could make sure that Cain stayed dead. Something, **anything** other than this twisted, nasty turn of things._

*** tbc ***

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, apperently you're all GREAT at guessing (or I'm really see-through), since a lot of you were pretty spot-on with your guesses!  
> Hope you're still with me. Sorry the updates are taking so long, but, well... vacation. Ocean. Lying on a beach. xD.  
> Anywho, hope you liked this chapter!


	4. Let's quiet your head

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First things first: FluffyGlitterPantsDragon is amazing, because where would we be without our beta-readers? In Grammar Hell, that's where!
> 
> Also, kudos to everyone who knows where I got the chapter title/lyrics from!

_He wakes up with a startled gasp, eyes scanning his whereabouts frantically. He’d fallen asleep in a holding cell, he’s sure he did. But he’s in the penthouse, slumped on the couch. There’s a crick in his neck and his suit is wrinkled and stinks of cigarette smoke, alcohol and human sweat – whether it’s his own or not is anyone’s guess._

_There’s flashes of **something** in his mind. Half-remembered dreams of hails of bullets and pain. Tearing , shredding pain._

_He sighs and picks himself up off his couch, shedding expensive fabric as he goes. The suit is pretty much done for anyway._

_Lucifer reaches his bathroom, now naked, and regards himself in the full-length mirror. He still looks good – he always does, his body not gaining fat, losing muscle tone… not changing at all. It had been the same even back when he still had his Devil Face, only sans skin._

_But he also looks tired. And that’s something he’s never really known before. He’s known defeat, when his siblings had banded up against him and then Michael, out of everyone, had chucked him over the edge of the Silver City. But even then – in pain, Grace MIA and humiliated, he hadn’t been this **weary**. Back then, he had gathered his disappointment, anger and pain around him like a cloak and used it all to build himself up from scratch._

_Now though, there’s nothing, just the wish to go to sleep and cease. Cease to fight, to hurt, to try. Maybe cease to be._

_While he stands under the shower he tries to gather his thoughts, tries to remember what he’d done before he came up here. He draws a blank._

_He knows he had tried to stay awake, to prove or disprove this whole Angel of San Bernardino business. He remembers a party, lots of TV (and maybe that’s where the gunfire still echoing in his ears comes from) and… zilch._

_His palms are pressed flat against the tile and he lets the water stream down over the back of his head, gives himself a few more minutes of **wallowing** , for a lack of a better word._

_Then he tames his hair and gets dressed. After, he looks into the mirror again. Better, but everyone who knows him will surely see that he’s far from his best, right?_

**_Wrong_ ** _, as it turns out. There’s no insight and worry happening when the person he **wants** to notice him is not even registering his existence anymore. He enters the precinct to a round of applause directed to someone standing in the middle of the bullpen._

_Two someones, actually. Chloe and Cain. **His** Chloe with that manipulative waste-of-space. Her left hand clasps his forearm, displaying her happiness for all to witness. She’s wearing a diamond ring and a smile that would’ve outshone a gem even ten times its’ size. It’s beautiful, **she’s** beautiful._

**_And she’s never going to smile at you, not like that_ ** _._

_He turns on his heel, rushes back to the corvette and stares at the steering wheel for a minute or an eternity._

_Then he fishes out his phone and orders flowers and a pretty card to be sent to the precinct._

_As he drives off he ignores the few tears that drip down his face, ignores the fact that they feel strangely like a warm palm cupping his cheek._

*** *** ***

It’s been two days now, and still he hasn’t woken up. He’s breathing on his own and he’s healing nicely, but he’s not showing any signs of waking.

Maze had been here for most of that time – half carried in by Linda and for all the world looking as though she should be in a bed of her own. But she had just shrugged (and winced in painful regret right after) and said she’d be fine.

Dan had left at some point, only to return with Trixie in tow and now… now they sat here, and it reminded her too much of a wake.

He was unconscious, not dead, damnit!

She shifted in her chair, crossed her right leg over the left for a change and cupped his cheek in her palm.

No sounds leave her, but she closes her eyes and prays and begs for something. Anything.

*** *** ***

 

_He wakes up on his couch. **Again**. This time he knows how he got there, at least, though there’s still something not quite right._

_He dreamt about lying down in one of the holding cells, and of the hard, unforgiving cot there turning into a gurney. He had bled and he’d been in pain, but it hadn’t mattered because Chloe looked at him with something other than poorly veiled exasperation. There’d been worry there, but also gratitude and fondness. But then he had drifted off, and he had slipped into a nightmare, and she’d been dead. He’d been arrested, and then he was back in the cell and on the hard bed, bleeding again._

_A hell-loop handmade for him, even if it was only a dream – even if reality was better only by the virtue of his Detective being alive._

_Maze had been there, just the day before yesterday. Hand-delivering a wedding invitation._

**_Chloe and Marcus cordially invite you…_ **

_He’d wanted nothing more than to rip the parchment to pieces and burn every last scrap of it but… it had been written by her, and he hadn’t seen her in too long. He knows he’s pathetic, but what else can he do?_

_He couldn’t go and help her on cases anymore. Cain had used his missing credentials to his advantage, and he’d been banned from police work._

_He tried meeting her outside of work, but she never had the time._

**_Yeah, no – I’ve gotta get Trixie from school._ **

**_Sorry, but I’m on my way to meet Marcus for dinner._ **

**_Jesus, Lucifer, don’t you have a life of your own? I don’t have time for your hallucinations right now!_ **

_So he’s been seeing less and less of her and she seemed happier for that fact. He wonders if it had been her idea to invite him to the wedding, or it that was Cain’s idea of payback for a deal broken._

_Either way it would be torture to attend - and either way he would._

_He heaves himself up, goes over to the stereo and puts on some music. It’s too quiet in here, and his thoughts are too loud in the silence._

_A song echoes through the room, slow and haunting._

**_Wake up, Wake up,_ **

**_Everybody wake up,_ **

**_Drag your bones to the fireplace heap_ **

**_For I must go walking as somebody else_ **

**_On the dreams of those fallen to sleep_ **

_He snorts. Yes, waking up sounds marvelous. Or to put on the skin of someone else, to not be Lucifer Morningstar anymore. Surely this must be hell?_

*** *** ***

Another day, and still nothing. At some point, Maze had bent down over him, put her forehead to his and closed her eyes. She doesn’t know what the demon had been looking for, but she hadn’t liked the look on her face when she stood up straight again. She’d been right, too.

“There’s nobody home. He’s… here, but not.”

Blinks, and a total lack of understanding. Mostly. She heard Linda’s sharp intake of breath and turned to face her. The other woman’s face had gone pale and her eyes were closed.

“He’s… back there, isn’t he?” Maze had just pressed her lips together and nodded.

At that point she volunteered Ella and Dan to grab Trixie and make a food-run.

When they were alone she levelled them with her sternest mom-look.

“Talk.” Linda and Maze had the silent communication thing down pat, she’s got to give them that, at least. In the end the ex-bartender sighed, sat back down and talked.

Told her about how Lucifer got a hold of the antidote. How he’d been stuck in hell and probably would’ve _stayed_ stuck if someone hadn’t gone down to get him out.

In the end, it boiled down to two things.

First - they had a distinct lack of Goddesses or Angels to go down and grab him.

Second - “But he’s not _dead_. How the fuck does someone get stuck in hell while alive?”

The explanation was too long and convoluted for her taste, but the end result was simple enough: Lucifer - his essence, his… _Lucifer-ness_ , was stuck in hell, and all they had was an empty body, and there was nothing they could do about it. Nothing but pray and wait.

“Wake up.” Barely loud enough to be heard, choked and wet sounding because she’s crying again, even though she had thought she had no tears left.

_Please_.

***TBC***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well? Do we have some AMS fans here, or am I the only one into the creepy stuff?  
> Also, reviews are love (I mean, I DID drag my ass off the beach in order to write this chapter...)!

**Author's Note:**

> I know - I'm just as bad as the show, what with the open ending and all. But just as the show, THIS WILL CONTINUE! I'm gonna hashtag the HELL out of any social media with the rest of you crazy people, and it's gonna be worth it!  
> Meanwhile... let me know what you thought of this little fic? Reviews are love, and I know we ALL need lots of love right now!


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